Everything you need to know about the bizarre Astros baseball hack

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating St. Louis Cardinals front office employees for allegedly hacking into the computer systems of the Houston Astros, the New York Timesreported Tuesday.

That word “hacking” has a funny ring to it once you dig into the details—this was by no means a high-tech affair on the level of foreign intrusions into American government networks. Yet this is exactly what a lot of “hacking” involves: Lapses, blunders, and bungles. It doesn’t take a crack squad of NSA whizzes to shuck open protected databases like a washed ashore shellfish. A target who fails to use proper password protections is all any adversary needs.

The primary victim in the Astros case, Jeff Luhnow, once worked for the Cardinals as a statistics expert. There he built a luminary database tool to give the team an edge, codenamed “Red Bird Dog.” But he never quite fit in there, as a profile in Businessweek details. Luhnow eventually flew the Cardinals coop, bringing his know-how in developing a signature data analytics platform with him to Houston. This one was called “Ground Control.” Its aim? To rejuvenate the struggling baseball team via big data and predictive analytics.

For all its Moneyball-esque hype, Luhnow’s secret weapon seems to have been felled by nothing short of bad password hygiene. As the law enforcement officers cited by the Times suggest, Luhnow failed to refresh the password protections on his system when developing the new tool at—or porting it over to—his new gig:*

Investigators believe Cardinals officials, concerned that Mr. Luhnow had taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros, examined a master list of passwords used by Mr. Luhnow and the other officials who had joined the Astros when they worked for the Cardinals. The Cardinals officials are believed to have used those passwords to gain access to the Astros’ network, law enforcement officials said.

The investigators presume Luhnow’s former colleagues gained access to the Astros’ precious database simply by peaking at Luhnow’s old passwords list. But Luhnow isn’t the only person to be sloppy; the so-called hackers were no better.

As if Luhnow’s possible password reuse wasn’t enough, the thieves—believed to be Luhnow’s old colleagues in the Cardinals’ front office—apparently launched the intrusion right from their own home. “Agents soon found that the Astros’ network had been entered from a computer at a home that some Cardinals officials had lived in,” the Times says. That’s a rookie mistake. As Deadspin writer Tom Ley advises, “Go find, like, an Internet cafe or something.”

But one detail from the story seems out of place. Why would Cardinals officials bother to post nearly a year’s worth of hacked Astros’ data to Anonbin, an online repository for leaked information? Was it done simply as a covert smear tactic to embarrass the Astros? Wouldn’t it be wiser to keep that information private and use it solely to gain a competitive advantage?

Of course, the investigation is ongoing, there is no way to know for sure who did what just yet. Perhaps the Cardinals and Major League Baseball officials’ subpoenaed communications will reveal more information. But if the reports are to be believed, then Moneyball-style stats may have revolutionized the game, but MLB officials are still dopes when it comes to cybersecurity.

* Update June 18, 2015: In an exclusive interview with Sports Illustrated, a sibling publication to Fortune, Astros’ general manager Jeff Luhnow disputed a number of the claims in the original New York Times story. He says he did not recycle passwords between the databases (to wit: “that’s absolutely false”), did not take any proprietary information from his time at the Cardinals with him to the Astros (“I didn’t take anything, any proprietary information. Nor have we ever received any inquiries from anybody that even suggested that we had”), and did not have a strained relationship with his former colleagues (“This wasn’t a bad breakup. It was a happy promotion of a person to a higher position in another organization”). Read the full report on SI.com.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly probing whether the St. Louis Cardinals breached the computer systems of rival team the Houston Astros in order to abscond with protected, proprietary information about players, statistics, and internal deliberations.

“The attack represents the first known case of corporate espionage in which a professional sports team has hacked the network of another team,” according to a report in The New York Times.

The alleged network intrusion appears to have been unsophisticated, said law enforcement officials cited by the newspaper. The investigators believe that the apparent compromise resulted from Cardinals front office officials accessing Astros’ general manager (and former Cardinals’ executive) Jeff Luhnow’s team databases.

Investigators believe Cardinals officials, concerned that Mr. Luhnow had taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros, examined a master list of passwords used by Mr. Luhnow and the other officials who had joined the Astros when they worked for the Cardinals. The Cardinals officials are believed to have used those passwords to gain access to the Astros’ network, law enforcement officials said.

The investigation was launched after the Major League Baseball alerted the FBI following a leak of information last year, the Times said. The investigators subsequently traced the hack to a computer on the premises of a residence that was at one time occupied by Cardinals officials. Subpoenas for Cardinals and MLB communications have already been issued.

MLB’s David Eckstein is the “Smurf” that could

David Eckstein always seemed a little out of place in the baseball world. As a player he was listed, generously, at 5-foot-7, 175 pounds, and he seemed closer in stature to the prepubescent batboys than to his peers. His batting stance was awkward: He crowded the plate with a low, wobbly crouch while choking up unusually high. And he fielded his position with even less grace. A shortstop for most of his career, he didn’t throw the baseball so much as he shot-putted it. Says Eckstein, now 39 and four years into his retirement from baseball: “I still hate watching myself throw on highlights.”

The numbers from his 10 years in the majors tell the story of a solid, steady infielder: 1,414 hits, .280 average, five teams, two All-Star elections, and two World Series rings, one with the Angels in ’02, the other with the Cardinals in ’06, when he also won World Series MVP honors after catching fire against the Tigers.

But the story of Eck—the 19th-round draft pick who became something of a baseball folk hero—was always told not with statistics but with adjectives from The Little Engine That Could: the plucky, determined overachiever who overcame his limitations. Eckstein laughs at the odd mix of idolatry and derision he inspired: “The back of my baseball card reads: OVERACHIEVING SMURF.”

Eckstein could have played a few more seasons. But there was one big reason to walk away after the 2010 season: to turn his attention to Her Universe, the company that he and his wife had founded the year before. Says Eckstein: “After all the years of her making my career a priority, it was time to make hers a real priority and really focus on growing the business.” Ashley had tabled her acting career—she had appeared in small roles in film and on TV—to move wherever David’s career took him. She had just begun working in voice-over on the popular animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars when she noticed that all the series’ licensed apparel was designed for men.

“Playing for managers like Tony La Russa and Mike Scioscia, Eckstein says, taught him to foresee “1%” possibilities, a skill he calls “invaluable.”

Ashley hatched the idea of making sci-fi clothing and accessories exclusively for girls and women, which she saw as an untapped market. Close to half of all sci-fi fans are women, her research showed. “Eighty-five percent of all consumer purchases are made by women,” she says. “So why wouldn’t you give us something to buy?” The numbers suggest she was right. Her Universe expects 2014 sales of $5 million, according to Ashley, who says the company is profitable but declines to give specifics.

David and Ashley are unlikely entrepreneurs. Ashley’s career had been spent in front of cameras. David’s only commercial venture as a ballplayer did not exactly set the world on fire: In 2006, fresh off his series MVP award, he partnered with a cereal company on his own brand. A few months after Eckso’s went on sale, Eckstein was in a supermarket and saw boxes of his eponymous honey-nut toasted oats collecting dust in the discount aisle. When he brought a package to the checkout, the cashier—unable to connect the ballplayer on the box with the man he was ringing up—snickered, “When are these athletes going to learn that this stuff just doesn’t work?”

That’s not to say that selling sci-fi T-shirts, hats, and hoodies to fangirls has been easy. “Similar to David’s career—David vs. Goliath, where he kind of defied the odds—we really had to defy the doubters and defy the odds,” Ashley says. She says Lucasfilm rebuffed her twice times, until she partnered with a brand-management company. Since then, Her Universe’s licenses have expanded to include brands like Star Trek, Dr. Who, and the Walking Dead. The bulk of the Ecksteins’ time now is spent in meetings with potential partners as they seek new licenses. Says Ashley of her husband’s role: “He isn’t in on every call, but he’s in on all the financial decisions and comes to all the big meetings. If we have a new deal, he’s my closer.”

November 6, 2006 Sports Illustrated World Series cover; St. Louis Cardinals David Eckstein (22) victorious after winning Game 5 and series vs Detroit Tigers.Photo By: Al Tielemans—Sports Illustrated

Ashley is a cult celebrity for her role in The Clone Wars. She is hounded by autograph seekers at sci-fi conventions, while David stays in the background, unrecognized—“I’m the guy holding the pink Caboodle,” he says. David tries to hold his own in this alien (for him) realm. At his first convention he repeatedly referred to a Star Wars light saber as a “life saver.” Says Ashley: “That was mortifying.” It’s getting easier for him. Eckstein recently talked to a man who couldn’t wait to play Dungeons & Dragons in his basement: “He kept referring to LARPing”—live-action role-playing—“and let’s just say the conversation was very quiet from my end. Now? I know all about it. It’s funny—LARPing in the basement may sound strange to a lot of people, but when you boil it down, it’s really the same thing as playing fantasy football. You tell someone who’s not a sports fan what you do, and they’re like, ‘You draft what, and you do what?’ The two worlds don’t really mix, and they would never admit that they’re alike in any way. But with the level of passion, they’re exactly the same.”

Eckstein isn’t yet spending his weekends LARPing, but he enjoys his new life. The strategy feeds his competitive side. “Playing for managers like Tony La Russa and Mike Scioscia, they break down games and they foresee a possibility that may be a 1% possibility, but they’ve already thought that through,” he says. Eckstein says those lessons are “invaluable” in his business life.

Eckstein’s true love, of course, remains baseball. He volunteer coaches at high schools and for Team USA baseball, and it seems inevitable that sooner or later he will return to baseball, either as a coach or as an executive. “It’s only a matter of time,” says Ashley.

For now, though, there’s a business to run. The Ecksteins still see their company as the little T-shirt company that could, trying to make it in the face of doubters (whether those doubters really exist or not). What fuels David these days is not unlike what motivated him all those years in the game. “The one thing you should not tell us is no—that we can’t do something,” he says. “Because we’ll do everything we can to prove you wrong. That’s the story of my life.”

For more great business stories in our Pro-Files series check out both Fortune.com and SI.com

This story appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Correction: A photo caption in an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Ecksteins live in California. In fact, they live in Florida. In addition, the earlier version incorrectly stated that Her Universe was rebuffed three times by Lucasfilm; in fact, it was rebuffed twice. Fortune regrets the errors.

A new video app for sports fans on the go

Imagine this: You’re out on the town while your favorite sports team is playing, and it’s impossible to watch the game. There’s no cable for miles and ESPN doesn’t mesh with your mobile phone carrier. There’s Twitter, but there aren’t any video streams, especially ones tailored to your liking. You’re simply out of luck.

Enter 120 Sports, a streaming network for mobile devices that will be introduced Wednesday at 6pm. It will offer breaking news and sports video highlights in two-minute bites.

Miss a goal in World Cup soccer? No problem. Want to get the latest on LeBron? Easy enough. You can search for what you want through the app, either by a specific sport or athlete. At the bottom of the screen are related stats, tweets, and stories (including advertising, which is peppered throughout).

The network is backed by Time Inc. TIME, which owns Fortune, with partners including the NHL, NBA, MLB.com, NASCAR and a number of college conferences through Campus Insiders. Silver Chalice, a media company that is one of the investors, will produce the site with a team of over 100 people while MLBAM, the digital arm of the MLB, will handle some of the technical infrastructure and software development.

“Building a venture of this magnitude could only succeed with the right group of sports and news organizations, and in the 120 Sports launch partners we have a product that will deliver on its promise to fans,” Bob Bowman, the president and CEO of MLBAM, said in a statement.

In addition to the app, users can get access to 120 Sports at its website.

“120 Sports is an innovative, addictive product that will give sports fans an amazing amount of always-on sports content and great technology so they can engage with news and highlights wherever they are,” said Todd Larsen, a Time Inc. executive vice president.

Time Inc. recently spun out from Time Warner and is trying to push beyond its core print magazine business into digital publishing. Like many traditional media companies, it’s trying to offset declining print ad revenue with new sources of revenue like online advertising.

But 120 Sports comes with challenges. Most of all, it must compete with a slew of other sports video sites, many of which offer live streaming rather than mostly highlights, said Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, a digital marketing company.

“I think they have a serious uphill climb,” he said. “I’m bullish on the format,” but he added that “they will have to overcome significant odds to crack the monopoly,” which Schafer said included the leagues themselves. The major sport leagues may be partners in the venture, but it may be better business-wise for them to send traffic to their own sites rather than 120 Sports, he said.

Meanwhile, the app lacks access to one critical component for its launch date — video from NFL games. The football league did not give any video rights, although executives says the conversation to get them is ongoing.

The key demographic for 120 Sports will be younger people who predominantly use mobile apps for news and watching video, Schafer said. But Sports Illustrated may not offer much of a lift in that area because the median age of the magazine’s readers is 42. That being said, over a third of the magazine’s nearly 20 million total audience fall in the 18-34 age range.

Schafer continued that keys to success for 120 sports will be delivering news and video that’s different from its rivals and that keep visitors returning. The same goes for the advertisers, who want to reach an audience that they can’t get elsewhere.

Big League Baseball (Fortune, 1937)

Editor’s note: Every Sunday we publish a favorite story from our magazine archives. As the summer sports season kicks off, we turn to this snapshot of the baseball business published in 1937. Neither depressions nor scandals, then as now, could kill America’s favorite pastime. “It continues to flourish, not only because it magnificently brings out the average American’s most healthful instincts, but also because it quite harmlessly brings out his most psychopathic ones,” this article says. It stands as a reminder of a time when the highest earning player, Lou Gehrig, earned $36,000 per-year. Play ball!

Drop in these days on that arch pessimist, the baseball owner–who is always looking out of the window for signs of rain or expecting to hear that his ace pitcher has broken his wrist–and don’t be amazed if he greets you with something that almost resembles a smile. It’s hard to look worried and anxious knowing how much faster the turnstiles are clicking off attendance in 1937 than they did in 1936, or have done in any season for years. The only solid explanation seems to be that 1937 is running ahead of 1936 generally; but baseball’s mystic sense vibrates, all the same, with the hunch that the game itself has taken on fresh allure and is nearing the peak of another cycle, as it did in 1920 and 1929. After all, the past few years have seen some hot races and close finishes, some spectacular performers like Dizzy Dean, Carl Hubbell, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller; some refreshingly mad teams (with a method in their madness) like the Gashouse Gang from St. Louis; they have lapped up huge publicity from the growth of the farm system, the fireworks of the All-Star Game in midseason, the unfamiliar glare of night baseball. Lumped together, such factors should make baseball “mysticism” pretty safe for underwriters.

Indeed, baseball has always come back: neither scandals nor depressions have killed it off. Not idly have you heard it called, once or twice, the Great American Game. It continues to flourish, not only because it magnificently brings out the average American’s most healthful instincts, but also because it quite harmlessly brings out his most psychopathic ones. Sport has always helped to satisfy man’s killer instinct, but someone actually had to be butchered to make a Roman holiday, and unpleasant things still happen to horses and bulls and men to make a Spanish or a Mexican one. Baseball is a far better safety valve. It subsists on purely vocal massacre: “Kill the umpire!”–and it purifies the blood by no costlier purge than yelling, swearing, sarcasm, and now and then a pop bottle. Dangerous steam is worked off in terms of innocuous sweat, and metaphorically your fan sweats as hard as your ballplayer–because he is your ballplayer. In no other game does a spectator engage in such intense vicarious participation, being now the player, now the manager, now the coach, now the umpire; hence in no other game is there so much rage when things go wrong, so much jubilation when things go right. The Great American Game, unlike the great British one, doesn’t make a fetish of fair play; it makes a fetish of success. Accordingly, in grandstand and bleachers heroes die like flies. Grandstand and bleachers tirelessly pump new cynicism, endlessly mint new wisecracks, showering all their affection on the man of the moment, all their contempt on the man of a moment ago.

For baseball’s paradoxical soul lies in its hooting and cheering alike out of the same deep well of rabid partisanship. In the end, all the national characteristics displayed by fans are swallowed up in their local pride. They forget they have paid money to see men perform for money in the money making interests of still other men. While the game is on, the fair name of Washington, the civic honor of Pittsburgh, the eventual fate of Chicago hang in the balance. Safety valve, business, amusement, sport–baseball is all of these; but more than any of them, it is imaginary ownership–something that belongs, as much as his hat or his home, to the fan. Of the approximately 8,000,000 persons who paid to see major-league games last year, the overwhelming majority, you can bet your boots, went because they wanted to see their team win.

That is why, though big-league baseball may be an industry, an individual team is something more than a business. Baseball is idiomatic, so to speak, not grammatical. There is no “typical” big-league club. Each one is a complex of varying elements–of the atmosphere of its particular city, the policy of its particular owners, the ideas of its particular manager, the personalities of its particular players, the location of its particular ball park, the number of victories to its credit, the degree of vehemence among its fans. Every major-league club stands in relation to the fifteen others as a theme in music does to fifteen variations. For this article FORTUNE will give the theme sometimes to one club, sometimes to another: as to the Chicago Cubs, scored for strings, or the New York Yankees, scored for horns, or the Gashouse Gang in St. Louis–scored for brasses.

Success story

No, there is no typical club. But there is an average player–call him Henry W. (Hank) Jogue. In 1933 he was making local history on the sand lots of–call it Lorain, Ohio. Worked in a hardware store but wanted to play ball for a living. Somebody in Lorain wrote to somebody on the St. Louis Cardinals: “Heard about your farm system … fellow here named Henry Jogue, hits like all hell, picks sizzlers right up off the ground … would advise you look him over. Respec’ly yours.” One day there was a stranger in the crowd. Hank hit like all hell, picked sizzlers right up off the ground. The next day he had a contract to play with Lincoln, Nebraska, Class D. Had a bad start–a little too green: then suddenly he came to life, hit, stole a flock of bases, ended up on a rampage. Finished the season hitting .327. He jumped two hurdles in 1934, clean into Houston, Texas, Class A, making his first real money ($2,000 a year) and earning it. Houston, September29. Hank Jogue, local third baseman, willgo to Columbus in the American Associationnext year, it was announced today. In Columbus Hank went right on hitting, right on stealing bases, learned to handle fast double plays. Last year he graduated into the Big Time. Up there the competition’s fierce, and Hank’s no knockout. Just an average player, hits .284, fields .970, earns $4,500 a year. If the market becomes glutted with unusually fine infielders, he’ll have to go back where he came from. But the chances are good that he’ll hang on up there for many a year.

That’s the Hank Jogue of the box scores. But there’s also the fellow who signs his contracts, in a schoolboy hand, Henry W. Jogue–the fellow who is part of a large, revolving industry.

Henry W. Jogue’s occupation is still not a hundred years old. It started–as fun–in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. It didn’t become work until 1869, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first all-salaried team. It got going in earnest in 1876, when the National League was formed. Chicago had Charter No. 1, Boston Charter No. 2, and they are the only clubs, it so happens, that have remained continuously in the league ever since. In the nineties it ran to twelve teams, including the famous Baltimore Orioles, who won three pennants in a row and had John J. McGraw at third base. In 1900 the circuit was cut down again to the eight clubs that have composed it ever since. The American League was organized in 1901, and at first the National League froze up on it. But in 1903 the two leagues made their peace, and since then most of their fighting has been confined to a lucrative scrap known as the World Series.

Since 1839 a great deal has happened to the Hank Jogues besides their coming out from behind their whiskers and playing ball in short pants. They have become tiny cogs in an industrial machine–a machine growing constantly more slick. Today, thanks to a special new lever known as the farm system, it works almost perfectly.

Hank’s pretty little climb up the ladder was really nothing but the machine in action. The day he left the sand lots he stopped being a free agent. The first contract he signed was the last one in which he had the right to pick his boss.* He played on one minor-league team after another that a big-league club either owned or controlled. He performed, less to thrill the fans of Lincoln or Houston than that eventually he might be worthy of thrilling the fans of Chicago or New York.

[*Exceptions: a player may be given his unconditional release at any time by the club holding his contract provided all rival clubs waive claim to him. If it can be proved that a club has Hank Jogue under contract in such a way as to violate baseball law–such as taking him direct from the sand lots to the big leagues–he can be declared a free agent by baseball’s final arbiter, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He then can sell himself to the highest bidder, as Tom Henrich sold himself this year for some $20,000 to the Yankees.]

Hank Jogue can’t bargain separately with ball clubs, as a musician can bargain separately with orchestras or an actor with producers. He works for a closed ring of proprietors, and it is the proprietors who make the rules. Once he signs up with, let us say, St. Louis, Hank is the property of St. Louis; when his contract expires he cannot accept more advantageous terms from, let us say, Philadelphia. He can only be sold or traded to Philadelphia. And when he starts downhill he can only go by sale or trade, be unconditionally released, or quit baseball.

Hank’s chattel status has been the same for years. But less than a generation ago he would have climbed into the major leagues by being passed from one boss to another. Today, with the farm system, it’s different. Thirty-odd minor leagues–ranging from Class AA at the top down through A-1, A, B, C, to D–form a compact hierarchy whose member clubs are nearly all under the ownership or partial control of the sixteen big-league clubs. It is “planned” baseball, with the minor leagues serving as prep schools for the majors. Hank Jogue steps from the sand lots fingerprinted, so to speak; already, while playing with a Class D team, he’s indirectly in the employ of a big-league team. The big-league team has “laid him down” for future use as a vintner lays down wine.

It was Branch Rickey, the St. Louis Cardinals’ brilliant Vice President, who, in 1921, created the farm system. Before then the major leagues were confronted by two difficulties: there was too much inequality and guesswork about obtaining players; there was too much chance of free-lance minor-league clubs’ collapsing after a disastrous season or two. In the past major-league clubs sometimes got first pick of minor-league players through “gentlemen’s agreements”—only minor-league owners weren’t always gentlemen. Later came the “working agreement,” by which the majors paid the minors direct option money–a method that still bulks largest in the farm system. But Rickey went further. He also bought minor-league clubs outright for St. Louis, and St. Louis operates them as it operates itself.

Today St. Louis, under Rickey’s generalship, controls thirty clubs, of which it owns thirteen. Besides the parent club these include three AA clubs–Rochester, Columbus, and Sacramento–and clubs in every other class except A. The chain system has brought St. Louis some of its greatest players–the Deans, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, Rip Collins (now with the Chicago Cubs); it contributed three-fifths of the men on its first great 1926 team; it contributed two-thirds of the men (as of May 10) on its this year’s team.

With St. Louis launching this campaign, other clubs eventually could not fail to follow suit. Soon after came the New York Yankees, who have the second-largest farm system. Later came others: some, like the Cincinnati Reds, because they were convinced of Rickey’s wisdom; some, like the Cleveland Indians, more or less in self-defense. Among clubs that have shown greatest resistance, even though by now they have partly fallen into line, the Cubs perhaps rank first. P. K. Wrigley, their owner, felt he hadn’t the time to get too deep into another side of baseball, though hiring a Rickey might have solved his problem. At any rate, in recent years the Cubs have acquired a number of players by buying them from other clubs.

The farm system has one great aim: to build up Hank Jogues for the parent club. Parent clubs do not hope to make money from the smaller clubs as separate performing units, and almost never do. St. Louis is budgeted to lose on operations $125,000 a year from its B clubs down; it seeks–but seldom gets–a $40,000 to $50,000 profit from each of its AA clubs, and during the past few years has built three new parks for them at a cost of $1,500,000. Where a team like St. Louis can make money, however, is in selling its overflow of material to other major-league organizations.

So, under the farm system, Hank Jogue is more than ever a chattel. The parent club can ship him from one minor-league team to another at virtually any salary it chooses. He is nowhere guaranteed a minimum salary, and in most minor leagues he is conditioned by the club’s salary limit. Furthermore, if Hank is an infielder worthy of the Big Time, and his parent club happens to be overstocked with worthy infielders already, it can keep Hank stuck away on the farm sometimes for years.

But Hank doesn’t seem to mind. Three attempts years ago to unionize players petered out, even though one, while it lasted, secured players such benefits as having the club pay for their uniforms and their traveling expenses in training season. Players, as owners are in a hurry to point out, are an individualistic race, and the stars, who could exert the most power, are the most individualistic of all. But a rank–and–file player like Hank is in much the same position that a rank-and-file actor was in before Actors’ Equity Association was formed, and has some of the same ends to gain from a union in organized baseball.

The bosses

You might imagine that the men Hank works for, watching him bob up and down on his $4,500 treadmill and controlling an empire, are glacial, tight-lipped, efficiency-mad padrones. You might imagine them clutching their franchises with predatory, bony fingers. But, with a gloomy self-depreciation that can never quite conceal the radiant smugness behind it, club owners like to say that you have to be crazy to go into baseball. Sometimes the slogan is varied to the effect that you don’t have to be crazy, but it helps. Nor is this wholly a smoke-screen attitude, for though every good baseball man faithfully regards his job as a business, he can’t keep his emotions out of it and wouldn’t if he could. Furthermore, no amount of skepticism on the part of the public can destroy the fact that, however successful a ball club may turn out to be, nobody ever bought one because it represented the soundest way of making money. The potential risks are out of all proportion to the potential returns. The variables are out of all proportion to the constants.

Not all ball-club owners, it is true, are men of independent fortunes. In fact, two of the most famous–the late Barney Dreyfuss of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the late Charles A. Comiskey of the Chicago White Sox–built up their organizations by the sweat of their faces and depended upon them for a living. But what might be called bread-and-butter clubs are few in number; far oftener there is the comfortable sensation of having Ruppert beer, or Crosley radios, or Briggs bodies behind you. Most men have gone into baseball chiefly because they were fans. Even Barney Dreyfuss, it is told, always asked, “What was the score?” before he asked, “What was the gate?” And now and then men acquire ball clubs out of civic interest: Powel Crosley Jr. took over the Cincinnati Reds, and a group of businessmen have taken over the St. Louis Browns, chiefly to prevent their franchises from going to other cities.

True enough, Colonel Ruppert saw the New York Yankees as a darn good investment. And true again, Fan-Owner William Wrigley Jr.’s son P.K., to whom the Chicago Cubs descended at his father’s death in 1932, treats baseball as a straight business though he likes the game as a sport as well. (P.K., along with J. Louis Comiskey and Horace C. Stoneham, belongs in a special category of owner–what might be called the Second Generation Man, or the Man Who Has Baseball Thrust Upon Him.) Aiming at steady volume, he is using the merchandising methods on baseball that he uses on gum. He has taken advertisements, in midwinter, in the newspapers; he has plastered Chicago’s El with baseball posters; he has attempted to advertise the Cubs in taxicabs; he has arranged with Western Union to open a ticket agency in some hundred-odd of its Chicago branches; he has put the club on a budget, which in 1936 was only $1,000 out of the way. Possessing the money for a long-pull experiment of this kind, he may eventually create baseball fans as well as tempt those who already exist. But outsiders and other baseball men think that Wrigley is a step ahead of himself; say emphatically, moreover, that his policy could work only in a very large city like Chicago or New York.

The mixed sentiments of most baseball men have created a somewhat anomalous industry. The eight clubs in each league, in terms of putting on a show, are like partners; in terms of assembling a cast, like competitors. Yet actually they are neither. They do not really pool their finances, although they support a common organization; they do not really pit their finances against one another, although they are rival bidders in the market place. They are simply a confederation of businesses dependent upon one another for existence but militantly independent in their operations. Baseball, perhaps the most publicized commercial activity in America, is perhaps the most secretly operated. As President of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., P.K. Wrigley can stalk a rival gum company; but as President of the Chicago National League Ball Club he is pledged by the rules of the game not to stalk another club. (What he happens to hear is another matter.) The proper analogy for a big league is an interfraternity association. The members stand ganged up against the outsider, but each has his own grip and password.

But the secrecy inside baseball is nothing compared to that displayed toward the public. Shushing has become the byword of the industry. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that some clubs keep their players’ salaries in code. Most clubs won’t tell you how much money they make or lose, though they will sooner tell you what they lose than what they make. Peculiarly yet logically enough, what causes this secrecy is the extremely public nature of the game itself. Just because every fan regards his team as a personal possession, he subconsciously disputes the owner’s right to it. For an owner to make too much money seems calculating–the reverse of public-spirited. Turn back your profits, yell the fans, into the ball team: buy more good players, fix up the ball park, cut the price of seats. So the shushing goes on, every club has its pet secrets, the Giants won’t give out even a lump sum on players’ salaries, the Cubs won’t breathe their attendance figures, the Pirates won’t say what percentage of the stock Mrs. Barney Dreyfuss owns.

But there’s nothing quiet about how a club gets its revenue. Listen, first and foremost, to the slapping down of bills and jingling of silver at the ticket booths. Listen, again, to the crunching of peanuts and crackling of popcorn in the stands. Listen to the radio booming out home games–which Wheaties (General Mills) or Mobiloil (Socony-Vacuum) or some other firm pays to broadcast, and which most clubs take advantage of. The Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers, who do not, insist that broadcasting hurts the gate. Notice, at the majority of ball parks, the screaming billboards on the fence. Some clubs, like the Chicago Cubs,* refuse to “mutilate” their park fences; but as an indication of possible returns, Charles A. Weber, the Cubs’ business manager, says he would gladly pay Mr. Wrigley $25,000 for the privilege of reselling the space. Your club owner also gets revenue from scorecard advertising; from renting out the park for prize fights, football games, rallies, and the like; and, finally, from selling players.

[*Only advertising at Wrigley Field consists of two Wrigley Gum imps perched on top of the four-story-high scoreboard.]

Of what he pays out, the largest amount goes into players’ salaries. For all sixteen clubs, salaries this year are reported to be in excess of $3,200,000–roughly half of total operating expenses. Individual payrolls differ considerably: the Yankees, probably baseball’s highest-priced team and including baseball’s currently highest-paid player (Lou Gehrig, $36,000), will cost this season around $370,000; the Pirates, by no means baseball’s lowest-priced team, will cost around $200,000.

For a breakdown of annual expenses, the Cubs for 1936 offer a good example of a higher-bracket club. Omitting concessions, plant depreciation, and reconstruction costs, and omitting any expenses in buying players, total operating costs came to $644,000. Of this $74,000 went into fixed charges, such as taxes and rent; $177,000 went into supplies, equipment, spring training, traveling expenses, and publicity. The remaining $393,000 went into direct labor of all kinds, that is, ground crews, ushers, and office force as well as players. Office force absorbed just $33,000; Wrigley himself draws no salary as President.

As for profit and loss, they run a fairly extensive gamut. Over the two-year period 1933-34, the Cubs lost $430,000; over the two-year 1935-36, they made $198,000. Last year nine of the sixteen clubs made money, two lost it, one broke even-and the remaining four won’t say what they did.

Without divulging the business of one club to another, the league offices act as clearinghouses and registry bureaus, regulate and supervise umpiring. Club owners or their representatives meet several times a year to approve the playing schedule; make, modify, or rescind the laws; agree upon new tactics or questions of policy. Each year sees one or two changes: this year, for example, it was voted to begin and end the season a week later than usual, since there is more likelihood of encountering rain and cold weather in April than in late September and early October. Next year, the modem “lively” ball will be stripped of some of its zoom.

Looming above all clubs and both leagues stands the Commissioner of Baseball, former U.S. District Judge Landis, who has been final arbiter of all disputes since the office of Commissioner was created in 1921 by vote of all sixteen clubs. Landis entered baseball at a ticklish moment, right after its worst scandal, when certain players on the Chicago “Black Sox” were accused of throwing the World Series to Cincinnati by accepting bribes from a pool of gamblers that included Arnold Rothstein. Before then, final jurisdiction had rested with a commission of three men–the two league Presidents and a club owner, the late “Garry” Herrmann of the Reds. This, to say the least, did not look well. Landis, a chest-thumping, vivid-spoken man past seventy–who as a judge once imposed a $29,000,000 fine (later reversed) on the Standard Oil Co. of Indiana–has the fighting look of a crusader, though his baseball record reveals no evidence of important crusades. But he remains the earnest of integrity that big-league baseball offers up to a public that sharply reacted (in cash as well as sentiment) to the game’s nastiest jam.

The boys

If you ask ballplayers about their work, their favorite comeback is: “The hours are good.” Nor do they mind what is frequently an economic snag–seasonal employment. When they hang up their uniforms in October, chances are less than even that they’ll go to work elsewhere; more likely they’ll get out their guns and fishing tackle for the fall, then wander south for some nice sunny rounds of golf. Not till after New Year’s need they think again of baseball.

After New Year’s, contracts arrive. Many players sign and return them at once; many others, however, have a way of discussing the matter with their wives, fathers, lawyers, and agents, and of reaching the conclusion that a ridiculously low estimate has been put on their playing ability. A month or more may be spent in reconciling differences of opinion, but when training season begins in late February or early March, most players have fallen into line. A few men hold out till after they are due in camp; occasionally somebody, like Red Ruffing of the Yankees this year, holds out till after the season opens. But in view of the alternative of having to quit baseball, almost nobody holds out for good.

Training season lasts six weeks to two months: part of it spent tuning up in camp, part in playing exhibition games. A player gets his expenses paid but draws no salary till the season opens. Spring training costs most clubs around $25,000; but it costs the Giants and Yankees $35,000 or $40,000, partly because they shoulder the expenses of twelve or fifteen, instead of the usual three or four, newspapermen. You can salvage a large part of training costs from exhibition games: the Cubs, this year, even showed a slight profit.

When the team has been punched into shape, it rides back to home grounds, but never for long. It spends half the season on the road, with a traveling secretary arranging for trains, transporting the baggage, herding the players into taxis (“Four to a cab, boys!”), straightening out the hotel bills. Years ago, when ballplayers had the reputation of being roughnecks, good hotels didn’t want them, but today good hotels compete for the trade. The Cubs, for example, use the Commodore in New York, the Copley-Plaza in Boston, the Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati. The boys sleep two to a double room. They used to get money for meals, but there was too much temptation to eat cheaply and pocket the difference, and today nearly all clubs make them sign for their meals at the hotel. Daily allowance with the Cubs is $4. A player’s only road expense, except for amusements, is laundry. His only equipment expense is for his gloves, shoes, and undersocks.

The boys may be glamorous fellows but they don’t lead glamorous lives. They lead pretty dull ones. A ballplayer has to combine the routine of a drummer on the road with the regimen of an athlete in training. If he breaks the rules, sooner or later he must suffer. The manager, who makes the rules, expects a few fumbles off the diamond as well as on, but, generally speaking, the rules work. The manager expects a player to be in bed, for example, by midnight, because he needs nine or ten hours’ sleep. The manager forbids him to drink anything stronger than beer, but a player will probably go off the rails now and then, and so long as he doesn’t come swaying into the clubhouse or staggering over the diamond, he will probably get away with it. Years ago there was a lot more hard drinking in baseball than there is today: John J. McGraw used to hire detectives to shadow some of his men. Still, only in 1930, Flint Rhem, then with the Cardinals, once disappeared for several days, turned up again much the worse for wear, to announce: “Bandits kidnapped me. They were gamblers, betting on Brooklyn. They pointed their guns at me and made me drink raw liquor for two days. It was awful!”

A ballplayer is usually married (got married in his early twenties), but his wife seldom goes with him on the road. Socially, it’s much the same to him whether he’s in St. Louis or Cleveland, Washington or Philadelphia, except that it’s five-to-one that he dislikes New York. For diversion, there is the dangerous lure of the movies, the siren voice of the popular magazine, the deadly wiles of pinochle or bridge for small stakes–poker and dice, like hard liquor, are usually against the rules. Now and then he may back a winner at Belmont or Washington Park, and he goes fairly often to the fights. Ballplayers and boxers often become friendly, since each likes the other’s game.

But for the most part the boys stick to themselves. Newspapermen see little of them: they seek them out for copy, but make it a point not to include them in drinking or gambling sessions. The manager sees even less of them: partly because it’s infra dig; partly because he doesn’t want to seem like a snooper; partly because he doesn’t want to form friendships that may lead to charges of favoritism. Umpires see them virtually not at all; following the “Avoid Suspicion” clause in their printed instructions, they never have meals or go on parties with the players, and usually travel on different trains and stop at different hotels. Bill Klem, baseball’s senior active umpire, who has been at the job for over thirty years, knows almost all ballplayers and is friendly with almost none. Klem, incidentally, believes he has never made a mistake umpiring a game: “I don’t call ’em as I see ’em, I call ’em as they are.” Even though they are goats on the diamond, most umpires enjoy their work; but away from the ball park road life sometimes can be very lonely, which is one reason Umpire “Dolly” Stark quit his job for a while. But the pay is good: Klem is reputed to earn $12,000 a year; most other umpires make from $5,000 to $10,000.

Far from ever killing a cat, a ballplayer’s curiosity would seldom kill a kitten. He is rarely concerned with what goes on in the world, whether it be Spain, the Soviet Union, the New Deal, or sit-down strikes. Rip Collins, who began life as a miner, displays no interest in John L. Lewis. There are many college men among the players today–“Tex” Carleton of the Cubs, Lou Gehrig and Johnny Broaca of the Yankees, Hank Greenberg of the Tigers, Luke Appling of the White Sox, Burgess Whitehead (who is also Phi Beta Kappa) of the Giants–but there is very rarely a highbrow. Moe Berg, who catches for the Red Sox, is one exception: he holds a law degree, has studied winters at the Sorbonne, and knows seven languages.

Among themselves, players go in for all the friendships you might expect, some of the hostilities, some practical joking that reminds you of The Rover Boys, and a good deal of rough weather, at times, for the rookie or sorehead. For the lighter side of hazing, take young Joe Marty playing his first big-league ball this year with the Cubs. One day when Rip Collins returned to the bench after hitting a home run, Marty rushed over to the water cooler to congratulate him; with an exquisite sense of the occasion, Collins thanked him by letting fly a mouthful of water.

The boys have their own lingo, though in a game so persistently replayed on paper, it’s not always clear where they have borrowed from sports writers and where sports writers have borrowed from them. Certainly “Annie Oakley” for a base on balls, or “papier-mâché” for a player easily hurt, smack strongly of the press box. But the well-known “cousin” for a pitcher easy to hit, and expressions like “barber” for a guy who talks too much, “strawberry” for a bruise, “sweetheart” for a star pitcher, and “rabbit ears” for a player who hears what is said about him, good or bad, smack more of the dugout.

Old-timers insist that players aren’t what they used to be, and that the game is getting too well-behaved. Today it’s not the umpire who’s threatened; he himself is the threat. If players still curse, they usually curse the universe. But certainly the present season has fallen short of Round Table perfection. Whole teams have become embroiled with each other, like the Giants and the Cardinals; Jerome H. Dean has been talking out of turn; the beanball–fired to hit the batter–has been a hot subject for discussion. The wages of unruliness is generally a fine: $25 for a minor offense, like getting into an argument and holding up the game; $50 for something more serious, like getting into a fight. But, as they put it in the clubs’ front offices, when your players are fighting so hard to win that they forget their bringing-up, you can’t expect them to foot the bill and fight so hard in the future.

Players have changed in other ways. There was a time when almost every other ballplayer had an Irish name (Detroit’s 1908 pennant winners included a Donovan, a Mullin, a Killian, a Coughlin, an O’Leary, and a Mcintyre); with German names like Wagner and Zimmerman and Schulte as runners-up. But today there’s a liberal sprinkling of Italian DiMaggios, Crosettis, and Mancusos; there’s a Polish Ogrodowski, a Lithuanian Malinosky, a Syrian Skaff, a Greek Kampouris. Most clubs today welcome a good Jewish player also, like Hank Greenberg of Detroit, or Phil Weintraub of Cincinnati, since he’s a sure-fire draw from the city’s Jewish population. There is no official ruling against Negro players, but there has never been one.

Formerly, too, the old-timers insisted that a man played ball because he loved it. But today, once the fever of the sand lots has burned itself out, most players are in the game for the money. Knowing their playing careers to be limited, they are looking above all for security. With most of them, even the limelight comes second. Unlike actors, the great run of them aren’t concerned with exploiting their personalities.

Yet great baseball personalities continue to flare up, as they did in the past with a Pop Anson, a Mathewson, a Ty Cobb, a Babe Ruth. No one is ever likely again to equal Ruth, but for sheer brass and base-stealing ability in the news columns, Dizzy Dean cuts a hardly less striking figure today. His fights with newspapermen, feuds with the league President, sit-down strikes on the mound, monkeyshines over choosing a bat, are too much a part of current Americana to need much restating here, but one fairly fresh anecdote may be added to the list. Seems that the Bees were arguing, in the privacy of their clubhouse, as to whether Dizzy’s teammate Medwick hit oftener to the left or right of the shortstop’s normal stance. A Boston player thought one way, Manager Bill McKechnie another. Suddenly a voice rang out, “Bill’s right!” and the startled team looked up to find Diz standing before them. Reminding him that he had no business breaking into their meeting, they witheringly invited him to be gone. Imperturbably, Mr. Dean continued: “Now don’t be silly. You listen to me. Last week the Pirates were having the same argument down in their dressing room, and they got left because they wouldn’t let me tell ’em.”

Men like Dizzy, however screwy their tactics, give baseball a tremendous lift. And men like him–most ballplayers, in fact–are forever being asked to speak at banquets, talk to boys’ clubs, appear at charity drives. They are also frequently asked to endorse commercial products. (Average price for most endorsements is around $100.) As it happens, there are cigarette endorsers, like Larry French of the Cubs, who don’t smoke.

How do you manage?

The manager runs the team. It is he and he alone who puts men in and yanks them out of the line-up, who determines all strategy, flashes all signals except those between pitcher and catcher, and makes all decisions. It is he too who enforces discipline, fines and benches players, has final say over their habits of living. Beyond that, his position varies. At one extreme, Bill Terry of the Giants has full power in the buying, selling, trading, and jockeying of players, being as much an operator as a manager; at the other extreme, last year Casey Stengel in Brooklyn was so much a subordinate that he once learned of a player deal from a reporter. But most managers work somewhere in between–in consultation with a higher-up. This may be the club owner, as it is in Detroit; the club President, as it is in Pittsburgh; or the general manager, as it is in Cincinnati.

Not all managers arrive by the same route. There are so few managing jobs that most ballplayers give them little thought. But players may get the bug (as Ruth did) when their playing days are numbered, and certain managers, like cocky Charlie Dressen of the Reds and mild-mannered Pie Traynor of the Pirates, have always had it. Some men, like Traynor, go straight into managing while they are players, then give up playing; others, like Jimmy Wilson of the Phillies, continue to play. Some, like Dressen, graduate from running minor-league clubs to running major-league ones. Joe McCarthy of the Yankees always wanted to rate the big leagues and knew he never could except as a manager.

It is pretty generally held by experts that a player manager is at a disadvantage. Of recent years there have been many such–Wilson, Hornsby, Terry, Frisch, Cronin, Cochrane; and there have been great player managers in the past, notably Frank (Tinker-to-Evers-to-) Chance of the old Cubs’ team. But handling two jobs at once takes an awful lot out of you.

Managers are far from alike. John J. McGraw was an autocrat, and so is Rogers Hornsby of the Browns, who handles his players simply as so many pawns. Mickey Cochrane of Detroit is a different, an “inspirational” type, all energy; whereas a still different type is Charlie Grimm of the Cubs, who talks to a player as one guy to another. Most managers are fairly popular; despite his unpopularity with reporters and cold-fish attitude toward the public, the most popular of all with his team is probably Bill Terry.

What a manager needs most, besides a thorough knowledge of the game, is an ability to think fast in a particular situation. But most managers, in any given situation, play percentages far oftener than hunches; hunches are too dangerous. Yet playing percentages doesn’t mean depending on mechanical tactics; you must try to be a step ahead of your opponent. Thus, what the game calls “crossing ’em up” happens frequently, though what the game calls “trick plays” may happen only once a season against any team. Example of crossing ’em up: with none out, and men on first and second, the batter is instructed to hit hard rather than perform his classical role of sacrifice bunter. Example of a trick play: with men on first and third, the man on first starts for second (the orthodox beginning of a double steal); the catcher, along equally orthodox lines, makes a feint of throwing to second, then wheels round to nip the man on third in his attempt to steal home; but Man No. 2 has stayed safely near third, and it is now too late to catch Man No. 1 at second.

Most managers agree about what a player must have to start off with. He must have speed and a throwing arm (it is possible to improve your hitting); if a pitcher, he must have a fast ball (it is possible to acquire curves and control). But in the long run, control alone will make or break a pitcher: the only kind of wild pitcher to play along with is a wild genius, like Brooklyn’s Van Lingle Mungo.

A manager has to nurse, soothe, shock, wheedle, bull y his players as their temperaments require. He has to have an eye for knowing whether a player is holding down the right position or should be shifted elsewhere. Men are often shifted around the infield or outfield, but otherwise about 95 per cent stay put after reaching the big leagues. Most players don’t mind being belatedly turned into, say, a left fielder or a second baseman, but they hate being turned into catchers–the catcher is the bull fiddler of baseball. Rarest reshuffle of all is to make a man into a pitcher: Bucky Walters of the Phillies is one of the few to whom it has happened. Managers are pretty well agreed about the game’s most valuable players today. No one denies that Hubbell is baseball’s greatest southpaw, few deny he is the greatest pitcher. Dizzy romps home an easy second. Pitchers aside (and pitchers always come first), most votes go to Joe Medwick or Lou Gehrig, both great hitters. As to what managers think of other managers, they rate Connie Mack and Bill Terry tops. And Branch Rickey is “the smartest man in baseball.”

The crowd

What lifts the game out of any limited pigeonhole to the level of life itself is the crowd. In one sense, you can box off the crowd by calling them customers. You can think of some 55,000 customers watching the Giants and the Cards at the Polo Grounds last June, when Carl Hubbell and Dizzy Dean opposed each other in the first game of a double-header. But if the Man from Mars, or even from Marseille, had been squeezed–and it would have required a lot of squeezing that day–in to the middle of the grandstand, he must have thought differently. To him, that packed, shouting, hysterical crowd must have indicated some great crisis in the life of a whole people, and whatever was happening down there on the field must have had the power to weld them together.

It had. There is an amazing camaraderie among fans. Watch them spotting one another and talking up the game while jammed in the trolley or the El or subway on the way out to the park. Getting all of them out there is a job in itself. The transit companies keep in touch, as a rule, with the ball club, to know how many extra cars or trains to run. And on big days there’s a fine parking snarl for automobiles; at the Yankee Stadium there may be 5,000 of them. Usually the only answer possible is a line of cars, overflow of parking yards, stretching in all directions. Out in Chicago P.K. Wrigley has toyed with the idea of raising the stands at Wrigley Field and installing a huge parking space beneath them, but at present he is spending too much money elsewhere to do more than toy.

Watch the fans arguing about a game that hasn’t been played yet while they buy their tickets. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a seat in the bleachers at fifty-five cents or a top-price seat in a box at $1.65 ($2 in Pittsburgh, $2.20 at both New York parks and in Brooklyn). Watch them surge in, fussing around to find just the seat they‘re after, particularly in the grandstand, where some of them would explode if they didn’t sit between third and home, and others if they didn’t sit between home and first.

Watch them, now they’re seated, getting hungry. In a great year, like 1929 at Wrigley Field, they’ll tear into 457,000 hot dogs, guzzle 570,000 bottles of pop, empty 267,000 bags of peanuts, put away 388,000 slabs of ice cream. On a hot day, your average rooter spends eighteen cents, netting your average concessionaire a profit of a dime. All the same, less than half the clubs run their own concessions; the others would rather take a juicy cut and let the other fellow hire the vendors and keep the books. The other fellow, at five eastern parks, is Harry M. Stevens, Inc.; at three western parks Jacobs Brothers.

Watch the fans swapping baseball dope in lulls during the game. Some of them could almost match Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide. Thinking all the way back to the beginning of the century, they’ll make known to you that Hornsby holds the batting record–.424 in 1924; that Lefty Grove holds the full-season pitching record—thirty-one and four in 1931; that the Cubs set a Won-and-Lost record in 1906–116 games to 36. And that the Athletics set a Lost-and-Won record in 1916–117 games to 36. They’ll tell you that the Browns are the only team that has never won a pennant, and the Tigers the only team that has never ended up in eighth place. They’ll reel off that the Giants have won the most pennants, namely twelve, and have the highest average for league standing, namely just above third place.

That’s nothing. They’ll also tell you that the Phillies’ park, famous for its short right-field “home run” fence, holds the fewest people (18,500); and that the Yankee Stadium holds the most (85,000 by the end of this year) and cost the most to build ($3,000,000). And they’ll be glad to explain that of the fifteen ball parks–for of course you know that the two St. Louis teams share the same one–twelve are owned by the clubs.

It is difficult to determine what bearing the location of a ball park has in fetching fans. In Chicago, the location of the Cubs’ park on the North Side and of the Sox park on the South Side has created a lucrative regional rivalry. The Cubs’ park, hard by a well-to-do residential section, draws a tremendous number of women fans. Many are steady customers; many more are simply Ladies’ Day faithfuls who get in free. Ladies’ Day at Wrigley Field is so popular that the Cubs now have to limit their passes to 20,000, which sometimes isn’t enough to go around. At Wrigley Field you might also once have seen Al Capone surrounded by his henchmen. Or another gangster named Bugs Moran who (while the papers ran huge headlines reading Where Is Bugs Moran?) was sitting day after day in the ball park. The Sox park is in the heart of an industrial center, near Chicago’s large Negro belt. (Negroes are fair fans.) The two clubs play up the rivalry for all it is worth, but it is probably less intense than they make it out to be and certainly less today than it once was. Most parks are in industrial centers, or in or near lower-class residential sections. This is far from a drawback, for most real rooters are workers and white-collar people. Navin Field in Detroit, however, is close to the center of town; Forbes Field in Pittsburgh lies next to lovely Schenley Park; and the Bees’ park in Boston is close to fashionable Brookline.

Though population is an immense asset, it is not an infallible yardstick, for there are naturally good baseball towns and naturally bad ones. Probably the best major-league city is Brooklyn, with Boston and Detroit the next best, and New York and Chicago good because of their size. Rated the poorest are St. Louis and Philadelphia: they become ennuyé even of pennant winners (probably one reason why Connie Mack had twice to break up his highly successful but expensive Athletics). Last year the Browns in St. Louis showed what a poor team in a poor town can look forward to: their total paid attendance for seventy-seven home games sagged to 93,000. The record high is around 1,500,000, achieved by the Yanks in 1928 and perhaps equaled by the Cubs in 1929 and 1930.

But in the main, so far as packing in the crowd goes, it’s not where the team plays, but how. It’s a winning team that makes the fans hoarse and the owner rich. And if it isn’t a winner, as Joe McCarthy puts it, you could install armchairs and serve a free lunch at the end of the sixth inning, and the crowd still wouldn’t come. Next to a winning team comes a close race: the fans want a fight as well as a finish. And after that comes personality on the ball field, whether in individual players or whole teams. Babe Ruth was a legend for the provinces; the Gashouse Gang from St. Louis tilts the road gate today partly under the heading of vaudeville. (Best drawing cards on the road are the Yankees and Tigers in the American League, the Giants and Cardinals in the National.)

But a winning team in a close race, all tricked out with glitter, can still come to grief. On crucial days the skies may open and the rain descend. Or injuries may cripple a team all rarin’ to go, as they did the Tigers last year, with Cochrane and Greenberg out of the line-up.

Finally, general economic conditions can mow down the most enthusiastic crowd in the world. The depression, reaching its baseball nadir in 1934, cut into gate receipts everywhere, although at the very beginning, when idle men still had money in their pockets, it boosted the gate a little. Pittsburgh, for example, with a team that finished second in both 1932 and 1933, was both years in the red.

But one part of any crowd can snap its fingers at depressions–the part that gets in free. The pass gate always does well. There are Boys’ Club Days at every park, Ladies’ Days at every park but the Yankees’. And there is a long line of such people as stockholders, politicians, clergymen, newspapermen, and a “friend of a friend,” who slide through on “pink slips.” New York and Chicago have particularly heavy free lists; last year, all told, the Cubs had 309,000 unpaid admissions.

The night has a thousand eyes

If the farm system is the great new move for players and owners, night baseball is the great new wrinkle for the fans. The idea itself isn’t new; a night game was played in Fort Wayne, Indiana, way back in 1883. But only since 1930 has night ball become a featured part of minor-league schedules and a godsend for minor-league attendance; and only since 1935 has Cincinnati–the only big-league club to play it at the moment–got under way with a $60,000 lighting system. In Cincinnati it has drawn tremendously: the seven regulation night games drew some 120,000 people

in 1936. Both St. Louis teams plan to play at night next season; as Sam Breadon of the Cards puts it, “It gives you seven extra Sundays a year.”

Cincinnati finds that night ball draws a new kind of fan: the sort that wants outdoor amusement on a warm night; the sort that works weekdays and drives to the country or plays golf weekends; husbands and wives spending their evenings together. But despite Cincinnati’ s success, most other clubs oppose the idea. They insist that the quality of the game suffers from too much glare in some parts of the field and too little light in others; that night ball keeps both players and spectators up too late; that in many cities it gets too cool for the fan’s comfort or the player’s welfare; that the game can’t be properly reported in the morning papers, with consequent loss of valuable publicity. Further, almost all big-league players dislike it. The Giants, acting within their rights, refuse to play the Reds at night, and the Yanks say they will refuse to play the Browns at night next year

The clash over night ball involves something fundamental. Those who favor it, with its “shopping” type of fan, its brass bands and fireworks, feel they can cash in on baseball as a form of general amusement. But the majority who oppose it see baseball as a tense competition involving violent partisanship, and prefer to put all their eggs in the basket of the stanch partisan. He doesn’t want brass bands; he doesn’t think of baseball as just an alternative to the movies; he regards it as something permanent in his life.

But whatever the future course of the game and whatever the future risks, there is no likelihood of its ever passing into civic or government hands. As long as the U.S. remains a democracy, baseball will voice the democratic emotions of the crowd. But equally, as long as the U.S. remains a democracy and therefore sanctions private enterprise, baseball will be rigidly controlled by private capital. The two facts may be complementary, or they may be contradictory; but whichever they are, they express, on a smaller scale, the basic character of the nation itself.

Letting a star slip away (Fortune, 2005)

Editor’s note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a story from our magazine archives. April 20 marked the 100th anniversary of the opening of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. In 2004, the Red Sox “reversed the Curse of the Bambino” and won their first World Series in 86 years, partly because of the deft work of team general manager Theo Epstein. One year after the 2004 win, Epstein rejected team owner John Henry’s re-signing offer, and Henry publicly questioned whether he was fit to own the Red Sox. Fortune examined the incident from a management perspective: what does a manager do to retain a valuable asset to the team? Epstein did eventually stay on as the Red Sox’s general manager, but left in 2011 to become president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs. Henry is still the principal owner of the Red Sox.

Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry regretted the remark almost the moment it escaped his lips. Public self-doubt is as rare in major-league sports as it is in bigtime business, and Henry had turned a Nov. 2 press conference on the team’s failure to re-sign Theo Epstein — the young general manager credited with exorcising the Curse of the Bambino and bringing deliverance in the form of a World Series triumph — into an anguished act of self-flagellation. “This is a great, great loss. I hold myself wholly responsible,” Henry whispered in a Fenway Park meeting room packed with 200 bloodthirsty media types. Then came the kicker: “I have to ask myself — maybe I’m not fit to be the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox.”

The only thing stranger than Henry’s confession was its tone. A hedge fund whiz who achieved fantastic wealth by trusting computer models to trade currencies and commodities, the introspective and reserved Henry generally views human emotion as the bane of sound decision-making. Yet there he was, misting up and saving himself from tears only with a mawkish movie quote, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Henry continued: “I had this romantic notion Theo was going to be our general manager for the rest of my life. Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would ever happen.” He shouldn’t have been surprised when a next-day headline blared HAS JOHN HENRY LOST HIS GRIP ON THE SOX?

For once, the overheated Boston press was asking the right question. By his own admission, the owner had allowed a critical management process to spin out of control. As a result, Henry had lost the man hailed for assembling the first Red Sox championship team in 86 years. The ultimate systems guy had trusted the system — and it had blown up in his face. Most agreed that the result would have been different had Henry relied on himself rather than his hierarchy. As Red Sox star Curt Schilling put it in an e-mail to Fortune: “In my opinion, had Mr. Henry handled the negotiations, Theo would still be the GM.” But Mr. Henry hadn’t, and Theo wasn’t.

How did Henry let the Epstein situation get out of control? On one level, it’s an age-old reminder of the perils of hands-off management and, more significant, the dangers of ignoring clear indications of looming trouble. On another, it’s a reminder of the conflict that can result when a protégé bridles under a mentor. Finally, it’s an object lesson in how not to retain a valued employee.

What makes those classic themes stand out in sharpest relief is the backdrop — not so much baseball as the media-saturated environment in which it took place, where leaks are endemic and every remark or gesture is dissected by the press and millions of fans. So volatile is the hothouse atmosphere of Red Sox Nation that a mere week after Epstein’s departure press conference, the rumor wire started buzzing that Epstein would return. It’s not impossible. Henry still pines for his old GM, so the story may have a happy ending. However it concludes, the Red Sox have been battered by bad press, hamstrung without a GM during baseball’s trading season, and riven with turmoil. What’s easy to miss is that those problems far exceed the damage from losing Epstein. They reveal a paradox: It may have been a mistake to let Epstein leave, but it could be an even bigger one to bring him back.

I first met John Henry in 2002, and it was immediately apparent that he is not your typical market whiz. In 20-plus years at the helm of his Boca Raton hedge fund firm, John W. Henry & Co., the soft-spoken Henry had made billions of dollars for investors by trading everything from gold to energy futures. Yet when I asked him where he thought the dollar was headed or what the future held for oil, his answer was always the same: a placid “I don’t know.”

Henry, you see, is the rare money manager who doesn’t purport to be an expert in the assets he trades. In fact, he thinks such expertise is counterproductive. What he is, he’ll tell you, is a student of human nature — or, more specifically, of how human behavior drives financial markets. Early in his career he combed through decades upon decades of market data, distilling pricing trends into mathematical models that gauge when to follow the Wall Street herd and when to zig if the frightened masses zag. “Actual data,” Henry would tell me, “means more than individual perception or belief.”

Now 56, Henry is a lifelong baseball fan. The son of an Illinois farmer, he came to love statistics as a kid, calculating the batting averages of Stan Musial and his other hardball heroes. So perhaps it’s little surprise that, when Henry purchased the Red Sox in 2002 for $700 million with television mogul Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino (who now functions as the organization’s CEO), he decided to employ the nouveau philosophy now known to the outside world as Moneyball, after the book that chronicled its famous proponent, Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane. In simple terms, it involves eschewing traditional baseball metrics and qualitative judgments in favor of newer statistical measures that better gauge the way games are actually won.

Henry hired a cadre of baseball number crunchers — among them author Bill James, baseball’s best-known statistical muckraker — and gave them the task of testing baseball’s hoary conventional wisdoms against the cold, hard facts of performance. Henry opined that the best way to improve a team was to “take away the manager’s bias and replace it with what actually works.” And so, for example, the Red Sox dumped manager Grady Little, who had committed the sin of allowing Pedro Martinez to pitch past the statistical danger point in the Sox’s bitter 2003 American League championship loss to the hated New York Yankees.

Leading the front office’s disparate mix of analysts and post-modern baseball men was Epstein, then a tender 28. He was the brainy (but dashing) Boston native whom the even brainier Henry had plucked from obscurity to be the team’s general manager. Epstein was initially derided by baseball lifers, many of them middle-aged former minor-leaguers, who viewed the Yale-educated lawyer as an interloper. But the World Series win two years later transformed him into Beantown’s favorite son.

Yet only a year after spraying champagne in a championship locker room, Epstein spurned a reported three-year, $4.5 million contract offer and walked out. Epstein offered only evasive platitudes as explanation at his press conference. “The way I am, to do this job you have to believe in every aspect of the job,” Epstein told a frustrated Boston press corps. “There’s personal reflection about a lot of issues, and in the end I determined it was the right thing for me not to return.” Epstein insisted that his much dissected, 14-year relationship with Lucchino was not the problem. Yet moments later, Epstein grimaced when Henry insisted there had been no “trust issue” between Epstein and Lucchino.

Henry shocked the sports world with his confession that “maybe I’m not fit to be the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox.”

Should Henry even want to keep Epstein? After all, the GM got some key lucky breaks and had strong colleagues.

Was that a telling slip? Epstein won’t say — he did not respond to numerous e-mails and phone calls seeking comment. Nevertheless, Henry wasn’t surprised when told of Epstein’s body language. “There was a trust issue, and after I read through the transcript, I realized I should have just said, ‘No comment,'” he concedes. “But I was trying to be very careful about not giving away his reasons. I felt like that’s up to Theo.”

Henry’s belief in the certainty of numbers gives him a detached negotiating style. One of his former hedge fund employees recalls that when it came time to haggle over raises, Henry took a clinical approach: “His message was basically, ‘I think you’re worth X, but if you feel you’re worth more, you’re welcome to test the market.”

At the same time, Henry has always been a delegator — and he has plenty of reason to put his faith in Lucchino, whom he calls “the best CEO in sports.” Lucchino, after all, has excelled at finding lucrative new sources of revenue. And it was Lucchino who groomed Epstein, taking the youngster with him from the Baltimore Orioles to the San Diego Padres and then to the Red Sox. Quite simply, without Lucchino, Epstein would never have been anointed Red Sox GM. But anyone who remembers, say, Jamie Dimon and Sandy Weill at Citigroup knows such relationships can be fraught as the junior party begins to emerge. Lucchino–who did not respond to requests for an interview — “has a reputation for being very hands-on with younger subordinates in a way that, after a while, most people struggle with,” says baseball consultant Craig Wright. The apparent result, according to Jim Callis, executive editor of Baseball America: “Epstein chafed working under Lucchino.”

Henry viewed Epstein as Lucchino’s responsibility. That may explain why Henry brushed off a direct warning. Epstein told him in August that negotiations were floundering and “could take a bad turn.” Henry says he told his general manager “to just communicate more, to be forthright.” Instead of intervening, Henry focused on other matters. The pennant race consumed much of his attention. And, as always, he was managing his hedge funds, several of which had fallen 15% to 20%. (Henry, who is quick to accept blame for myriad mistakes in the Epstein affair, dismisses the notion that he was distracted by his funds’ travails.) Whatever the reason, he never plunged into the nitty-gritty of the negotiations until it was too late.

Henry’s biggest mistake may have been failing to push for an early resolution. “Negotiating a talent deal against a deadline is never a good idea,” says James Sebenius, a Harvard Business School professor who teaches a course in negotiating strategy. Not only does the talent gain leverage as the deadline approaches, but in this case the Red Sox wound up losing not only Epstein but also his likeliest successor, assistant GM Josh Byrnes, who accepted the top job with the Arizona Diamondbacks days before Epstein resigned.

Henry’s other key tactical error also stemmed from his hands-off attitude. Epstein wanted to hire an agent to represent him in contract negotiations; Lucchino said no. “I actually thought it was a reasonable request, but I also saw why Larry did not,” says Henry. “No front-office person he’d ever dealt with had ever used an agent.” Henry now concedes the obvious: The talks would have been less personal had an intermediary been negotiating with Lucchino rather than Epstein himself.

Though Henry’s willingness to take responsibility is laudable, what’s striking is that the systems guy is still ruled by passion when it comes to the Epstein issue. Plenty of other people could do the job, leaving open the possibility that Henry’s real mistake wasn’t letting Epstein go but rather making such a public fuss about his exit. Nobody denies that Epstein is a smart guy with good people skills. Schilling, for example, insists he never would have joined the Red Sox had Epstein not charmed his socks off. But mightn’t another GM have made an equally good impression?

Epstein acted immaturely at times. According to Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor and a well connected sports business expert, Epstein was angered by a Boston Globe column that revealed that it was he rather than Lucchino who reneged on a trade with the Colorado Rockies in July. In the columnist’s telling, Lucchino was the hero: “Lucchino took the fall, killing the deal and saving Epstein.” Epstein was outraged by the article. During his press conference, he denied that the column affected his decision to resign, but Zimbalist isn’t buying it: “It’s unlikely you would own up to that because it does seem a little bit callow and precipitous.”

It’s also worth asking whether Epstein had gotten too much credit. According to one baseball insider friendly with Bill James, many of the under-the-radar players Epstein signed–including playoff heroes David Ortiz, Bill Mueller, and Kevin Millar — were players James had recommended. “Epstein is a better than average GM,” this person says. “But there is a lot of credit and blame in this business that gets stuck in places where it’s not deserved.” James declines to discuss his advice other than to say, “From my standpoint, we sink or swim together.”

Finally, Epstein benefited from good fortune. For example, superstar designated hitter David Ortiz emerged only because the Sox’s first choice, Jeremy Giambi, flamed out, notes Callis, who adds that the team came within a hair of losing the pennant in 2004. Had that happened, it’s doubtful Red Sox Nation would be gnashing its teeth over the departure of a GM who led them to two consecutive defeats to the archrival Yankees. “I think it’s possible to be very good at a job and overrated at the same time,” says Callis. “Theo probably falls into that category.”

While Henry seems to hold out some hope for a rapprochement with Epstein, could the relationship between Lucchino and him be repaired? Could Lucchino, who is so effective in other ways, change the way he operates to keep Epstein happy? Would Henry want him to? And why should Henry coddle Epstein, who has put himself ahead of the organization? Henry might look a few miles south for guidance. It was in Foxboro nine years ago that the New England Patriots wrestled with the departure of legendary head coach Bill Parcells after he had a row with Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Fans thought the sky had fallen, but not Kraft. “You can’t be dependent on one person, because what happens when that person isn’t there?” he said at the time. A few years later the Patriots hired coach Bill Belichick and began winning Super Bowls.

Ironically, Henry believes the Red Sox’s road back started at his much-maligned press conference. “I know that quote [on whether Henry is fit to be the owner] may not have played well in the papers,” he says. “But for me, losing Theo was very emotional — very much like losing Game 7 against the Yankees in 2003. Back then, we all came back to the ballpark the next day so focused and determined to win a championship, which we did the next year. Well, that quote sort of galvanized me in the same way. What gives me great energy and enthusiasm to get past what’s gone on here is to prove that I am up for the job. Because I am.”

Take me out to the boardroom (Fortune, 1997)

Editor’s note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, we turn to a July 1997 feature on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Team owner Frank McCourt announced this week that he will sell the baseball franchise to a consortium led by Magic Johnson for a record-shattering $2.15 billion. In 1997, however, the O’Malley family still owned the team, but the longtime owners were on the cusp of selling it off to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Fox Entertainment Group paid approximately $350 million for the Dodgers in 1998 — a record price at the time (News Corp. sold the team to McCourt in 2004 for $430 million). Murdoch’s purchase portended an end of an era for both the Dodgers and major league baseball, as corporations took a greater controlling interest in sports franchises.

By Roy S. Johnson, with Rajiv M. Rao and Erin Davies

Peter O’Malley sounds like a man who’s tired of the fight. His family has owned the Los Angeles Dodgers for 47 years –a longer tenure than any other ownership group in Major League Baseball — but earlier in the year he stunned the sports industry by announcing that the team, one of baseball’s crown jewels, was for sale. It is a sunny afternoon in May, and in a few days O’Malley will make a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., selling the team for an extraordinary $350 million, the most ever paid for a sports franchise.

But on this particular day O’Malley is troubled. He’s a baseball man, after all. Running the team has been his full-time job — practically his only job — and the Dodgers franchise has also been the O’Malley clan’s primary investment. Yet as a family business, baseball has become almost absurdly expensive and contentious. Labor wars. Rising salaries. Marketing ineptitude. Disappearing fans. A commissioner? Please. For O’Malley it is time to cash out and leave the headaches to someone more battle-ready. Someone who can afford to ride out the squalls of the tempestuous sports scene. Someone who might bring some fiscal discipline to the sport. Someone who can afford to pay him what he wants. O’Malley knows that that someone will almost certainly be a corporation.

Franchises are rapidly becoming the core asset in the sports communications business, and long-ball hitters are buying them up. The media lineup includes Murdoch's News Corp., Eisner's Disney, and Levin's Time Warner.

“Corporate ownership is the way of the future, and I think that’s good,” O’Malley says, looking out at the field from his wood-paneled office inside Dodger Stadium. “I think it was [the late Chicago Cubs owner] Phil Wrigley who said that baseball is too much of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport, and golly, he was right on target. The last four years have been very tough for fans, players, owners, executives, everyone. In many cases, corporations have a greater sense of responsibility and more financial stability — as well as fewer personal agendas — than some of the individuals who have bought franchises, and that appeals to me a lot. Corporate ownership is good for sports.”

Good or bad, it is revolutionizing the economics of professional sports. Once the sale of the Dodgers is approved by baseball owners — and they will approve it, despite Murdoch’s running feud with Ted Turner — News Corp. NWS will become one of 52 public companies owning at least a slice of the 113 Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, or National Hockey League franchises (the NFL doesn’t allow corporations to own teams, at least for now). Once a playground for the rich, pro sports is swiftly becoming a company picnic. “Almost total corporate ownership is an inevitability,” says Leigh Steinberg, the influential agent. “It’s a trend that can be delayed but not reversed. Leagues can resist it. They can create rules trying to discourage it, but ultimately the nature of the sports-entertainment matrix will demand it.”

Murdoch, in fact, is staking claims on the sports landscape as if he were in the Oklahoma Land Rush. While still crunching the numbers on the Dodgers deal, he actually ended up owning pieces of the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers as part of an $850 million investment in Rainbow Media, the sports programming arm of Cablevision Systems. (Murdoch is expected to sell his stakes in the New York teams to clear the way to purchase two teams closer to corporate headquarters: the Los Angeles Kings and a portion of the Los Angeles Lakers. That way he’ll have the part of Southern California that doesn’t already belong to Disney DIS, owner of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and 25% of the Angels.)

Beyond the sheer numbers, the News Corp. deals are emblematic of a deeper change: Sports franchises are quickly becoming the core asset in the sports communications business, and the long-ball hitters are getting into the game. Murdoch’s arrival creates a true Murderers’ Row of powerful media and entertainment companies in the owner’s boxes. Leading off with Tribune Co., which purchased the Cubs back in 1981, the lineup now includes Disney, Time Warner twx (Atlanta Braves and Hawks, and the NHL expansion Atlanta Thrashers, who begin play in 1999), Comcast CMCSA (Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers), and Cablevision CVC.

What attracts these companies is a powerful mix of potential strategic alliances: a growing need for live-event programming in a zillion-channel broadcast, cable, and satellite universe; the emergence of sports franchises as solid “brands” that can be exploited in numerous ways; and the opportunity to blend sports with the companies’ entertainment properties in stadium and arena complexes where the game is only one of many attractions. “Our main goal is to get people to spend their disposable income with properties associated with the company, whether they’re our theme parks, videos, movies, or our sports teams,” says Tony Tavares, president of Disney’s Anaheim Sports. “If you’ve got a dollar, we want it.”

To put it another way: An entertainment brand is really a set of managed allegiances, and there’s no quicker way to forge an allegiance than by purchasing fandom. “What else can you go out and buy today that’s a living, breathing example of tradition and loyalty?” says Mark B. Mahoney, who heads the investment banking division at First Union, which has represented many companies seeking to tap into the sports industry. “A film library? A music collection? That’s about it. Besides, how much would it cost for any company to go out and build a brand on its own? It’s easier — and probably cheaper — to simply buy something everybody already likes.”

For all these reasons, a sports franchise has an entirely different kind of value for a corporate owner than it does for a family or an old-fashioned syndicate. If annual profitability is what you’re after, you’re better off with a Burger King franchise than with a sports team. Soaring salaries will likely force almost half the National Basketball Association teams into the red for this season, despite an expected increase in league revenues to $1.5 billion this season from $1.3 billion in 1995-96. In baseball, teams lost in aggregate between $200 million and $300 million last season. “Operating the team is essentially the same business it was in the 1920s; you sell tickets and hot dogs,” says Stan Kasten, president of the Hawks and Braves. “And there’s only so many you can sell. It’s not like Microsoft, which can grow a million-dollar business into a $50 billion business.”

The Dodgers, for instance, had $13.5 million in operating income last year on revenue of $75 million. Does that justify a price that’s about 30 times earnings? Sure, if you’re a conglomerate with plans to conquer the world, not just win the World Series. Compared with News Corp.’s $10 billion in annual revenues, the purchase price of the Dodgers looks like a rounding error. “So what if a huge company overpays by $25 million or so,” says Mahoney. “It’s nothing. Immaterial. Fundamentally, cash flows are generally low in comparison to values, but companies are not buying for value, they’re buying the underlying software. The payout’s in the pipeline.”

Home of the Braves: Kasten (center) and McGuirk (right), who oversee Time Warner's sports teams, created a $242.5 million multimedia cyber-stadium at Turner Field.

No kidding. Baseball as a fully leveraged asset bears hardly any resemblance to what you may recall as a quiet day at the ballpark with Dad. The $242.5 million Turner Field in Atlanta, the Braves’ new world, is a testament to what lies ahead: interactive cyberball. You can pitch and hit in simulated games, use electronic kiosks to peruse scouting reports on 300 current and former Braves, or watch any other Major League game in progress on one of the televisions in the Clubhouse Store. Big screens show live locker-room interviews, and there is enough fiber-optic cable buried underneath the place to allow games to be broadcast live anywhere on the planet. Kids can frolic with Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters in the children’s areas. And oh, yeah, the Braves play there too.

As a business, baseball is learning what basketball has known for more than a decade. “I talk about the NBA as having 29 ‘theme parks,’ cable distribution, a consumer products business, publishing interests, trading cards, and sponsorship relationships,” says league commissioner David Stern, in his Manhattan office overlooking Fifth Avenue. “Those are areas that are attractive to the people at any major company. With that combination of opportunities, plus the increasing value of the franchises themselves, it was inevitable that you would soon move toward an ownership mix of the Fortune 500 and people among, if you’ll pardon the expression, the Forbes 400.”

Since 1990 the cost of entry to the NBA has quadrupled. That year the Orlando Magic and Minnesota Timberwolves paid $32.5 million each as expansion teams. Two years ago the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies anted up a whopping $125 million each to join the party. In baseball, Baltimore businessman Peter Angelos and a group of investors (among them novelist Tom Clancy and former tennis star Pam Shriver) purchased the Baltimore Orioles four years ago for the then handsome sum of $193 million. In light of the Dodgers’ deal, the Orioles could likely command much more if they were for sale.

“Individuals are simply being priced out of the marketplace, unless they’re infatuated with the thought of owning a team,” says Jerry Colangelo, president and CEO of the Phoenix Suns and part owner of just about every sports property in the city, including the baseball expansion Diamondbacks and the Coyotes hockey franchise. “But that will become a more and more expensive toy.”

Corporate owners aren’t new to pro sports, of course. Teams were wearing the names of local businesses on their uniforms as long ago as the turn of the century. Big business stepped up to the plate in 1953, when Anheuser-Busch BUD bought the St. Louis Cardinals.

Big media first entered the game in 1964, when CBS CBS purchased 80% of the New York Yankees for $11.2 million (later it bought the rest for $2 million). But a ball team was just a ball team back then; the breathtaking TV deals were still more than 20 years away. Licensing and apparel sales were in their infancy. Autographs were free. Nine years later, with the Yankees faltering, CBS sold the team to a partnership of wealthy individuals led by a bombastic shipbuilder named Steinbrenner. The price tag: $10 million. Nice investment, guys.

A few years later, Turner, then a fledgling entrepreneur, had this zany idea of building a national television network out of a tiny UHF station by beaming its signal to cable systems around the country via the emerging satellite technology. Lacking much juicy programming, Turner had another radical thought: Buy the Braves and the Hawks, slap them on the bird and let ’em fly. So began the “superstation,” which ultimately begot a slew of broadcast properties known as Turner Broadcasting System, acquired last year by Time Warner (corporate parent of Fortune’s publisher). Turner is now Time Warner’s vice chairman.

That strategy will never be repeated: Each league now controls the national and international television rights to its teams, so an owner today can’t use the franchise as national programming the way Turner did. Today the opportunities lie in local and regional programming.

Enter Murdoch, the guy who likes to change the rules of every game he plays. The guy who dropped a bomb into the middle of the NFL’s television negotiations three years ago by offering a staggering $1.58 billion to broadcast National Football Conference games. Today his Fox network also shares the national broadcast rights for Major League Baseball (it airs a third of all baseball games televised). Now he’s at it again. With the Cablevision move, Murdoch makes the sports cable game a real slugfest.

The king of sports cable at the moment is Disney’s ESPN, which reaches 71 million homes and carries only national programming. Murdoch is betting that on most nights, fans would rather watch their home team than a nationally televised game between two other teams. In a joint venture with TCI, he is stitching together a network of 20 regional cable outlets, called Fox Sports Net, that televise local teams.

Once the deal’s done, FSN will own the regional rights to 49 pro teams and reach 55 million households nationwide. Since telecasts of the home team usually earn higher ratings locally than games televised nationally, Murdoch will be able to offer national advertisers a unique alternative to ESPN: a customized package of regional advertising that could, in aggregate, reach an audience bigger than what ESPN’s national telecasts draw. Also, Fox Sports Net will be able to sell the kind of local and regional advertising ESPN can’t. “It’ll take some time for Fox to find its programming stride, but obviously ESPN will be looking over its shoulder,” says Mike Garofolo, vice president of local sports for Zenith Media, a division of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising.

How does owning the Dodgers, and possibly the Lakers and Kings, fit into this strategy? Unlike national and international rights, a team’s local and regional rights can be exploited freely by the owner. And live sports is some of the most valuable programming in the land. “Our business has become more and more event-driven, and sporting events are second to none,” says News Corp. co-chief operating officer Chase Carey. “Sports will have a more and more important role in our business. That’s part of what justifies our belief in this move.”

Not all corporate team owners have quite so elaborate a game plan, but all are looking for leverage of one kind or another. The beer synergy endures: Coors owns part of the Colorado Rockies, Interbrew SA of Belgium has a stake in the Toronto Blue Jays, and Molson owns the Montreal Canadiens. (Anheuser-Busch sold the Cardinals last year, but it still owns the NHL’s St. Louis Blues.)

End of an era: His family has owned the Dodgers for 47 years, but Peter O'Malley is cashing out and leaving the headaches to Murdoch.

Other potential owners are forming corporate versions of the old-fashioned syndicates of rich individuals, putting together groups of local companies to either buy an existing team or attract an expansion team to give a boost to the regional economy. That was the pitch Jerry Colangelo made when he began approaching Phoenix-area companies four years ago about forging a partnership that would ultimately bid for a Major League Baseball expansion franchise. Fourteen businesses eventually helped forge a group that pledged $300 million, which the lords of baseball couldn’t resist. What was the attraction for the locals, who could certainly have found other, more profitable places to stash their cash than in the Diamondbacks? “I think it was a situation where the private sector invested simply to add to the quality of life in the area,” Colangelo says. “All of them, for instance, are competing for talent, just as the teams are. And just as we think this is a city where athletes will like to play, our investors believe that the presence of sports will make Phoenix an attraction for their own potential employees as well.”

Beer and boosterism will always have their place in sports, but it is the big media companies that have shown other owners how their teams can play in a larger arena. In Toronto, Isaiah Thomas has a vision for the Raptors that extends far beyond winning an NBA championship: He wants the team’s dinosaur mascot to become “the Mickey Mouse of the sports world.” (Remember when that phrase would have meant the very opposite of an ambitious dream?) The former all-star guard has owned 9% of the two-year-old team since its inception, and he currently heads a group of investors, Chase Manhattan among them, that’s trying to purchase the controlling interest. “I don’t see the Raptors as just a basketball team,” Thomas says. “I see them as one day being the centerpiece of an entertainment entity. Our intention is to make this a $1 billion company. Even now our corporate culture is to create an environment in every division similar to what Disney has done.”

The Raptors may be the only “ride” in Thomas’ proto-Disney so far, but already he’s thinking in terms of the sports-entertainment matrix. “I want to be able to preserve the sheer enjoyment a fan gets when he walks through the door, sits down, and buys a hot dog from a vender,” he says. “They should experience that true joy, not what I feel when I close a business deal. In Disneyland you’re in Mickey’s World, not Michael Eisner’s.”

Take a good look around. Take a deep breath. Take your kids. Dodger Stadium won’t feel like this much longer. The view from O’Malley’s office is a window to an era when natural grass, one-run games, and a Dodger Dog were enough. There are no luxury boxes. No corporate logos plastered everywhere — just an inconspicuous Coca-Cola sign atop a pole in center field.

It is a special place, and the Dodgers are a special team: winners of six World Series, breakers of baseball’s color barrier, the team of Koufax and Drysdale. “We have an extraordinary tradition, and we respect it, nurture it,” O’Malley says. “Our reputation is unique and we want to enhance it. We’re proud of it, and it’s very important to all of us.”

News Corp.’s Carey and Peter Cherin, the company’s other co-COO, will be charged with preserving what’s special about the Dodgers. They’re on the hot seat, and they know it. Screw this Dodger thing up, and FOX is fur. Yes, they’ll start building sky boxes as soon as the deal is ratified, and yes, they’ll welcome corporate sponsorship and advertising. But no, Bart Simpson will not throw out the first pitch of the new regime. “We’ll be far less intrusive than others,” says Chernin, a former New Yorker who grew up a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “We know the Dodgers represent something special to the people in the city, evoking an era of nostalgia that resonates from Jackie Robinson to Hideo Nomo.” Adds Carey, a longtime Yankee fan: “This is a wonderful opportunity to build upon something that already resonates with its fans. With some of our other businesses, that’s the hardest part.”

There will be a few speed bumps as the sports industry barrels toward corporate ownership. Conflict of interest, for instance. During negotiations for national broadcast and cable rights, three media company/owners will be represented on both sides of the table. FOX and Fox Sports Net, ESPN, and Time Warner’s WTBS and TNT all figure to vie for some portion of the broadcast or cable rights whenever any of the league’s current contracts expire. The rights are now negotiated by committees made up of a handful of owners, but as more and more corporations buy franchises, it may become increasingly difficult to screen out the potential conflicts.

Another bump: Each of the leagues has rules preventing owners from circumventing salary-cap regulations by offering “side deals” like stock, options, or movie deals to players. But who’s to say some of the major media companies, with their television and movie units, won’t be more attractive to an agent looking to sign his client with a team that offers a few (wink, wink) “post-career opportunities?” Leigh Steinberg calls the notion “tempting.” NBA team executives, for instance, must sign affidavits stating they won’t cut such deals. But if Michael Jordan ambles into Jerry Reinsdorf’s office and asks for a piece of the Chicago Bulls in exchange for playing another season, what’s the guy supposed to say? You haven’t earned it, Michael. Sorry.

Major bump: Do the math. As successful financially as Major League Baseball, the NHL, and the NBA may claim to be, their annual revenues are no match for those of many of the large corporations whose teams they must govern. Could the big dogs someday plot to take over the pound? Fear of such a putsch was at the heart of the NFL’s decision to ban corporate ownership decades ago. “We’ve always had the view that the ultimate value of our franchises is in being part of the overall operation,” says Stern. “If you deteriorate into anarchy and are unwilling to check your corporate identity at the door, you’re going to wind up with a very damaged asset that won’t be able to compete globally.”

Traditionalists will warn that the big, bad corporate Cuisinart will ultimately grind sports fans’ cherished games into pulp. Decisions will be made with the stock price in mind, not the final score. The number crunchers will force the team’s general manager — the guy who knows sports — to pass on the high-priced free agent because, well, the numbers didn’t work. Fans will be assaulted with nine innings of “It’s a Small World,” four quarters of Batman and Robin previews, or three periods of insipid scenes from Party of Five.

Relax. It’s not likely. Let’s face it, many of the sports industry’s current ills — public bickering between players and management, nomadic franchises, and fiscal irresponsibility, to name a few — can be blamed largely on the few egotistical individual owners who allow personal agendas to override the good of their sport. In fact, corporate owners would probably never commit the sin of moving a franchise — the bane of the fan’s existence. Why? Does Michael Eisner really need a bunch of rabid fans picketing at Disneyland?

“Some rich guy who believes he has only a five- to seven-year window in which to win will spend almost any kind of money to do so,” says Peter Ueberroth, the former baseball commissioner. “Corporations will tend to be more responsible. Operating records will be more public and thus available to communities and fans. Ultimately they are more responsible to shareholders than to fans, which should bring some reasonableness to the cost of salaries.” It’s a nice thought, but probably not a very realistic one. Hasn’t at least one of the media companies that also owns a sports franchise paid Demi Moore $20 million to star in a movie?

There is reason to believe that, in the end, not much will change when it comes to what matters most — winning. Most successful corporations and the people who run them are as competitive as they come. If it comes down to signing the free-agent 20-game winner for $50 million or meeting the Wall Street analysts’ estimates, well, which way are the new corporate owners likely to swing? “Do we need to make money?” asks Terry McGuirk, president and CEO of Turner Broadcasting System, which oversees the Braves and Hawks. “Yes, we try to. Do we always? No. But we take a lot of value in winning, and sometimes we’re willing to sacrifice profits in order to achieve that.”

Bud Selig: Ready to play ball

Major League Baseball’s commissioner on the Mets and Madoff, Pete Rose, and labor problems in other leagues.

Opening day is upon us, and with it the dreams of summer. Allan H. “Bud” Selig, 76, can’t wait. He’s been commissioner of baseball for 19 years, and he still rejoices in the rites of that first pitch. He’s also pretty happy with the state of Major League Baseball: Revenue last year was a record $7 billion, up from $1.2 billion when he began. There’s labor peace, and steroid scandals seem to have abated. What’s left to worry about? For starters, the mess the New York Mets are in over the Madoff fraud — its owners are being sued for $1 billion by the trustee representing the victims. Fortune talked by phone to Selig in his Milwaukee office. Edited excerpts:

Do you wish you had disclosed MLB’s $25 million loan to the Mets sooner?

No. I’ve known [owner] Fred Wilpon for 32, 33 years and have great affection for his family. I’d do it the same way again. There was precedent.

Are press reports correct there won’t be any more loans to the Mets?

Fred gives me daily updates, but that matter has not been discussed.

Does that mean that a request for another loan from MLB would automatically be rejected?